What is wrong with our preoccupation with rights? It causes us to shirk our duty to be civil and humane, Nigel Biggar argues in his new book, What’s Wrong with Rights? But Michael Ignatieff is not sure that’s true:

A recent controversy at Oxford over academic freedom and rights of free speech, in which Biggar was a major player, brought rights and virtues into clear conflict. In 2015, Biggar was on the side of those who wanted the Cecil Rhodes statue at Oriel College to stay up. Many others, perhaps a majority, wanted it pulled down. In 2017, Biggar set up a research project on ‘Ethics and Empire’ to take on the question, among others, of whether imperial rule could ever be justified or legitimised to its subjects. He made it clear that the British imperial past, considered morally, was a source of both pride and shame.

The project called forth a torrent of denunciation from academic colleagues at Oxford and elsewhere, who argued that it appeared to be ‘complacent’ about and ‘even celebratory’ of Britain’s imperial heritage. While some of his colleagues called for Oxford to shut it down, the university did no such thing, and Biggar’s right to conduct controversial research and his opponents’ right to protest against it were both respected. The rights of each were undamaged, but good faith was broken and collegiality suffered.

Biggar would take this episode as proof that insisting upon our rights can lead us to forget duties to be civil and humane. ‘Whereas we have no trouble at all in confidently asserting our own legal rights or those of others, we become diffident or tongue-tied in talking about duties and virtues and moral law. Rights-talk does not embarrass us, while talk about what is morally right does.’

This strikes me as the wrong diagnosis. Both sides in the ‘Ethics and Empire’ controversy were anything but ‘tongue-tied’ about who was right. Both were all too certain of their own virtue. Biggar’s opponents claimed, in effect, that he must be an apologist for racism and colonialism, and Biggar claimed, in reply, that his opponents were unscrupulous manipulators of the truth. The problem here is with virtue, or with excessive and exalted claims to virtue on both sides. It’s enough to make me grateful to Oxford University for ensuring that if neither side could respect each other’s claims to virtue, they could at least respect each other’s rights.

In other news: Walter E. Williams has died. He was 84. Nick Gillespie remembers him in Reason: “A self-described ‘crazy-ass man who insisted on talking about liberty in America’ long before he was a public intellectual, the racist violence and abuse he suffered at the hands of police, military officers, and other authorities informed much of his work. In his powerful, evocative 2010 memoir, Up From the Projects, he recounts the time when, as a cab driver in the City of Brotherly Love, he was ordered out of his cab by a white officer, beaten up, and then charged with disorderly conduct . . . His two best-known works are probably 1982’s The State Against Blacks and 1989’s South Africa’s War Against Capitalism, both of which focused on the ways that governments systematically constrained the basic rights and freedoms of racial minorities by denying them opportunities to live and work however they saw fit . . . The state, Williams argued, typically forced blacks into hopeless situations, provided ineffective relief, and then blamed the victims for failing to rise above their circumstances, all while consolidating power into elite hands. Seemingly beneficial interventions such as minimum wage laws that priced unskilled blacks out of the labor markets, public housing in crime-ridden projects, and mandatory schooling at terrible public institutions were particularly pernicious because they came wrapped in a rhetoric of beneficence. Williams was also a contrarian. He attacked discrimination by the state but defended the rights of private citizens to exclude whomever they wanted for whatever reason. A public library, he said, couldn’t discriminate, but a private library could turn away anyone it wanted to.”

Tony Woodlief writes about the time he invited Williams to come to UNC to talk about South Africa’s War against Capitalism. Tony stocked the audience with antagonistic poli sci students. It didn’t go well for the students.

A global history of the Napoleonic Wars: “One of the strangest stories from the Napoleonic Wars involves several hundred soldiers from the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. Some of these men had originally arrived in chains from Africa, and nearly all of them had lived in slavery until the massive, dramatic slave revolt of 1791. In 1801, they were serving under the charismatic, ambitious and independent-minded black governor Toussaint Louverture when Napoleon dispatched a military expedition to reassert full French control over the colony. The French forces, commanded by Napoleon’s brother-in-law Charles Leclerc, had some initial success. They captured Louverture, and shipped him back to France, where he died in captivity in 1803. But an epidemic of yellow fever killed many of the Europeans (Leclerc died of it) and opened the way to a black victory. On 1 January 1804, the new state of Haiti declared its independence. The Haitian soldiers weren’t able to enjoy this turn of events. During the campaign, Leclerc’s troops had taken them prisoner and secured them on vessels offshore. After the defeat, they were simply brought along to France. There, Napoleon forcibly enrolled most of them in a new unit of the French army that he called the Black Pioneers, commanded by white officers. He sent some of them to France’s surviving Indian possessions, and later to Mauritius. The others he gifted to his brother Joseph, when Joseph became king of Naples in 1806. Renamed the Royal Africans and briefly commanded by Joseph Hugo, father of Victor, they fought Calabrian guerrillas before joining Napoleon’s campaigns in Germany and Russia. A strange and bitter journey, which took men from Africa to the Caribbean, to France, to Italy, and then to the retreat from Moscow in 1812.”

Benjamin Riley talks with Clive Aslet and Dylan Thomas about British country homes: “[A]ll these buildings are protected, and that is one reason why [the owners] have to be much more aware, in the same way that because of the rise in the value of works of art, they know much more than would have been the case, say, in the Edwardian period, when they might have used family portraits as a dartboard or something. That doesn’t happen anymore because everybody knows [the paintings are] worth lots of money. But I think that there are different levels of response to the architecture. At Helmingham, they’re actually very aware of the fact that the previous generation did a lot to it and are incredibly sensitive to this sense of transition, which is an important theme. So they’re very conscious, not just of the importance of the house, but they’re aware of what Ed [Tollemache]’s parents did to it. Somebody like Martin Fiennes at Broughton Castle just adores every aspect of the house. Everything about it. He’s so intellectually curious. He works in Oxford. His family basically lives in Oxford. But for Martin, [Broughton] was where he grew up. And he is just so interested in the armor, which was all assembled, some of it faked, in the 1860s.”

Nicholas Thompson has been appointed CEO of The Atlantic: “The Atlantic has now surpassed 700,000 total subscribers––gaining more than 400,000 subscribers since the launch of its paywall 14 months ago––with a goal of reaching 1 million subscribers by the end of 2022.”

We live in an age of cant, Theodore Dalrymple writes, and it’s terrible: “Doctor Johnson defined cant as “a whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms.” Cant is contagious, and, when widespread, it creates an atmosphere in which people are afraid to call it by its name. Arguments then go by default; and if arguments go by default, ludicrous, bad, or even wicked policies result. I think that we live in an era of cant. I do not say that it is the only such age. But it has never been, at least in my lifetime, as important as it is now to hold the right opinions and to express none of the wrong ones, if one wants to avoid vilification and to remain socially frequentable. Worse still, and even more totalitarian, is the demand for public assent to patently false or exaggerated propositions; refusal to kowtow in such circumstances becomes almost as bad a sin as uttering a forbidden view. One must join in the universal cant—or else.”

I contributed a short piece on Andrew Young to an online forum on “Poetry and the News.” Young was a Presbyterian minister and poet, beloved by C.S. Lewis, the Beats, John Simon and Philip Larkin. James Matthew Wilson kicked things off last month, and the forum includes responses from Scott Cairns, Remy Wilkins, and Christian Leithart. Aaron Belz will respond next week.

Photo: Salzburg at night